What parts of the Bible have been added, taken out, rephrased into man's opinion, changed, altered, words/phrases added to suppress women...
Many questions.
Looking for honest and true facts that have been found.

If you are looking for items to help feed your doubt, there are many excellent and scholarly works on "how the Bible came to be".

Noah as a version of Gilgamesh. Jesus as some ancient Egyptian story. Jesus as a form of Hercules. Were these stories that passed about, or did they all independently bubble up from the desert region as some kind of collectively-shared idea about the world around them. Or did one of them actually happen?

As far as selective editing, I'm sure you might find an example or two, but I rather think the Bible can pretty much be taken at face value as "authoritative" on the Judeo-Christian faiths once the official canons have been recognized. Even the process of canonization is a form of doctrinal development: either Tobit or Job as narratives are about as believable as the other. Tobit remains in the dueterocanonical books of the Catholic and Orthodox and apocryphal in the Protestant, while Job is incredibly important to faith understanding in all if Christianity. Here's the rub: Jesus quotes from the Old Testament proper AND from books considered Apocryphal by Protestants. Maybe we should consider Jesus' reading list?

I suggest that, perhaps, we take from Scripture that which is about faith and morals as truth. The bad history, bad science, weird stories as augments - a narrative to move the story along.

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i am a captain of side-industry, navigating the murky waters of part-time self-reliance in the on-demand economy.

Personally, I don't have much difficulty accepting the miracles of the Bible. As a Christian, I believe in the virgin birth and the resurrection, so why not believe in the parting of the Red Sea and the feeding of the five thousand, for instance?

What I do have difficulty with is the human rights abuses under the Mosaic law, and the oppression of women throughout the entire Bible.

I raised similar questions in another thread, although it took me several pages of rambling to say it instead of three sentences .

Hmmm. Well one item comes to mind. The Book of Jude references the Book of Enoch as Scripture. However, though the Book of Jude is considered Canonical, the Book of Enoch is not. If you read the Book of Enoch, you'd understand why! But it is an oddity.

Whenever we come across a Bible passage that references "the Scriptures," we ought to remember that there were No official "Scriptures" other than the Torah until well after 100 AD. Not even the Hebrew Bible existed as complete until then. The only books we absolutely know were in the Septuagint at the time of Jesus was the Torah, and some of the Psalms. The Septuagint did not ever include Enoch, by the way! It is probable that some of the historical books and some of the prophets were translated by Jesus' time, though the work was not finished until after 100AD. There were evidently many discussions about what constituted sacred text and what did not.

And of course, God never weighed in on the matter to actually tell anyone. He left that to people to figure out.

The creation of the Canon of Scripture was a messy process. If that makes you think human beings then had a lot to do with the creation of the Scriptures themselves, you would be right.

If you click on my name, and look at my list of threads, you will find at least three threads specifically on the Bible and several others of the problem of Authority.

There are five major canons, and several additional minor ones. Five different committees chose different books for different reasons.

Once you chose the canons, you have the problems of choosing which which actual words to select, since there are no two manuscripts that are identical. For the OT there is the Masoretic text and the Septuagint.

Then we go into the actual translation headache.

It is a VERY human trait to try to simplify things to try to make sense out of them.

Bottom line, God continues to talk to each one of us in whatever way God wants to, in spite of all our efforts to dictate Orthodoxy to the rest of Humanity.

So, The Bible? Take what you need, and leave the rest.

That is what all of us have been doing even before there were canons.

For every difficult and complicated question there is an answer that is simple, easily understood and wrong." H.L. Mencken

(11-27-2017, 10:36 PM)Ricardo Wrote: If you click on my name, and look at my list of threads, you will find at least three threads specifically on the Bible and several others of the problem of Authority.

There are five major canons, and several additional minor ones. Five different committees chose different books for different reasons.

Once you chose the canons, you have the problems of choosing which which actual words to select, since there are no two manuscripts that are identical. For the OT there is the Masoretic text and the Septuagint.

Then we go into the actual translation headache.

It is a VERY human trait to try to simplify things to try to make sense out of them.

Bottom line, God continues to talk to each one of us in whatever way God wants to, in spite of all our efforts to dictate Orthodoxy to the rest of Humanity.

So, The Bible? Take what you need, and leave the rest.

That is what all of us have been doing even before there were canons.

Thank you for this. I am in the middle of a mid life muddle as far as my spirituality goes. Always learning. Shoving around thoughts and previous things learned. It's been a VERY, VERY hard struggle for me.

I have done some studying on the history of how the Bible came to be and its been very eye opening.

I had an "assistant pastor" in a previous church fill me in on some history of the Bible years ago. I thought it was pretty cool that he would be honest with me. We were in a very Fundy church at the time and if the Pastor had known he was explaining certain things to me, he probably would have been fired. Yes, it was that bad.

I do remember one statement he told me. He said that if you cornered some of these MOG that outwardly force KJV only-ism they would have to tell you that they are NOT 100 % sure that the Bible is totally God's exact Words. That was something.

I'll never forget it.

Thank you for your advice and the list of threads. I will look at these when time permits.